Ticking in the walls
Ticking in the walls of an aging timber house, a soft tap like a watch, was long read in English lore as a death omen. The sound comes from deathwatch beetles calling for mates.
What it may mean
The tapping of a deathwatch beetle is faint enough that most people never hear it. It takes a still room, old timber and someone lying awake, and that is exactly when it was heard: during long nights beside a sickbed. English lore, as Brand and Grose recorded it, made the clicking an omen that someone in the house would die. Seen from the other side, the omen says more about the listeners than about the beetle. Worry sharpens hearing, and a sound that had always lived in the beams suddenly seemed to be counting. A faint ticking on a sleepless night is worth a second thought about what kept you awake enough to hear it.
Depending on how you saw it
Swift's cure
Jonathan Swift mocked the omen in verse, as Brand quotes him: chambermaids christened the wood worm a death-watch, and a kettle of scalding water poured into the timber would break the omen and let the sick recover. Which fear of yours could be eased by fixing something practical?
Behind the wallpaper
The 17th-century writer Richard Baxter, quoted by Brand, found by trial that the noise he heard came from a tiny, pale insect running behind paper pasted to the wall, heard chiefly in summer heat. When did patient checking replace a fear with a small, plain answer?
The poverty insect in Japan
In Japan, a ticking insect called the poverty insect was said to serve the god of poverty, who could be sent away by putting a coin in a bamboo bellows tube and throwing it into a stream. What do you do to send away a worry about money?
Why it happens in nature
Deathwatch beetles, Xestobium rufovillosum, live in old hardwood, mainly oak, that has already been softened by fungal decay. In spring the adults knock their heads against the wood to attract mates, a faint tapping that carries in silent buildings. The larvae tunnel inside the timber for years before they emerge, and the adults do not feed.
What folk beliefs say
England
Grose, as Brand quotes him, called the clicking of a death-watch an omen of the death of someone in the house where it is heard.
Source: John Brand; Henry Ellis (ed.), Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, vol. 3 (1849), vol. 3, p. 226. View the page
Britain and Ireland (18th-century verse)
Jonathan Swift's verse, quoted by Brand, mocked the belief: chambermaids called the wood worm a death-watch because it clicks like a watch, and a kettle of scalding water injected into the timber was said to break the omen.
Source: John Brand; Henry Ellis (ed.), Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, vol. 3 (1849), vol. 3, p. 226. View the page
England (Somerset)
In Somerset, Daniels and Stevans write, the ticking of the death-watch heard in the oak beams of an old house was not necessarily taken as a sign of death, though it was believed to announce some dire misfortune.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 710. View the page
Japan
In Japan, a ticking insect called bimbo mushi, the poverty insect, was said to be the servant of Bimbogami, the god of poverty, and its ticking in a house signaled his presence; he could be sent away by putting a coin in a bamboo bellows stick and throwing it into a stream.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 195. View the page
To reflect on
What has kept you awake enough lately to hear things you usually sleep through?